The Jewish Trail of Tears The Evian Conference of ... - Haruth.com

free of Jews by forced emigration based on financial, social and political
disenfranchisement. However, such resettlement could not threaten German interests and
should be focused on the “backward” regions in Palestine, Africa, Asia and South
America. 27 This pro-Zionist view of Palestine as a potential haven was, according to
Hanna Arendt, an “indisputable” component of the early phase of German anti-Jewish
policy. Eichmann’s success served as the model for the management of Jewish affairs in
Berlin and later in Prague following the creation of the Protectorate over Bohemia and
Moravia as well as the forced deportation of Jews and Poles during 1939-40 from regions
of occupied Poland and their replacement by ethnic Germans, the Volksdeutsche. 28
Fear rapidly engulfed the Jewish community as the Nazis assumed power in
Austria, accelerated by the rapid enactment of anti-Semitic laws coupled with a one week
long pogrom. Hundreds and later thousands of terrified Jews would besiege foreign
consulates seeking visas that would aid their escape from the Reich. Jewish men and
women were randomly assaulted on the streets and Jewish owned stores and businesses
were ransacked and destroyed. Jews tried to hide themselves within the confines of their
homes located in the Leopoldstadt suburb of Vienna in which one-third of the city’s Jews
resided. This area, allocated to the Jews by Emperor Ferdinand II in the Edict of
27 Eichmann outlined the aims and methodologies of the S.D. in a training paper, “The Jewish Problem,”
during early 1937. Wildt, Die Judenpolitik des SD, 95-105 cited in David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann
Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), 51.
Following a trip to Palestine Eichmann and Hagen concluded that Palestinian resettlement would only
strengthen Judaism in the Middle East and the creation of an independent Jewish State needed to be
prevented.
28 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem—The Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Books, 1994), 58.
During the period of December 1939 and March 1941 500,000 Jews and Poles were forcibly deported.
Eichmann attempted during October 1939 the first mass deportation of Jews to a reservation near Lublin,
Poland in the unsuccessful Nisko project but later was promoted to the directorship of the Central Office
for Jewish Emigration for the entire Reich.
28